Going through a difficult phase of fighting

Friday

Nov 5, 2010 at 8:00 AM

Chuck BoutwellColumnist

I’m not a violent person.And I’ll beat up anyone who says I am.I don’t even watch football because I keep thinking, “Can’t you all just share the ball? Why do you have to fight over it?”But seriously, I’m about two-thirds of the way to being a pacifist. I’d probably make a good Quaker — if there were more of them around here and if I liked oatmeal more.The last fight I got in was actually 33 years ago. There are people born after my last fight who have grandchildren. That’s six presidents ago. That’s long enough for a messiah to be born, grow up, do a bunch of cool stuff, teach people how to be nice and then leave in a really interesting and multiphased way. It‘s complicated. Read the book.Before I learned how to be nice, I was a troubled child and got into a lot of fights in elementary school. I was suspended a lot, and corporal punishment was a weekly occurance. When the principal got tired of suspending and spanking me, he would make me scrub the baseboards all around Mulberry Elementary School.The school wound up with very clean baseboards.I didn’t fight right. Most fights start out as two people mouthing off to each other, then they square off and bow up. Then one will shove the other, and the other will shove back. Finally, someone from the crowd that gathers will shove one of them into the other, and the fight starts.I didn’t do it like that. As soon as I saw a fight was inevitable, I would just skip all the shoving and stuff, and just haul off with a great big, baseball pitch punch. It usually didn’t last long after that. There was one time I got into it with a new kid at school who had studied boxing. He had absolutely no problem dodging my slow, baseball pitch punch. He then started with these quick little punches one after another. He followed me around with these quick and fairly painless punches, but I couldn’t hit him. I didn’t have any other punches in my repertoire, so I just left, found a teacher and turned myself in. I went through a change of life in junior high school and pretty much stayed out of trouble after that, although in high school I got into a very limited scuffle. A number of multiple-failed older guys picked on me every day in an electronics class. The teacher had quit a few weeks into the year and we were left semi-unsupervised for most of the year. A couple of the more abled students got one of the TV sets running and we watched “The Gong Show” every day. Then we’d play cards and take a long lunch.These older guys would give me a finger pop to the back of the head every time they walked past me. I don’t know how they did it, but it was some whipping and snapping motion they did. It was hard enough to make a sound that you could hear from across the room.One day, I thought I’d try to do something about it, so I waited until the biggest of the group popped me — and I made my fancy schmancy move.I’d seen Johnny Quest do a judo throw on the cartoon many times. He often defeated much larger assassins or frogmen or spies with this move, so I thought I’d give it a try.I stood up, faced him, grabbed his shoulders and dropped backward. As I hit the floor, I rolled onto my back and planted my feet into his stomach. Our momentum, and a well-timed push of my feet, should send him flying across the room.To my surprise, it worked perfectly and he sailed across the room.It was beautiful. Until he landed squarely on his feet and stood up just as I was getting up; just in time to punch me right in the face.The other students separated us before it went any further. That’s why I say it was a limited scuffle. If they hadn’t separated us, he would have kicked my rear up and down the classroom until the “Gong Show” ended and it was time to go to lunch.A teacher came in. We were suspended. And we actually became pretty good buddies after that. They all stopped picking on me — certainly not because I was any kind of threat — but the event sort of made them think about things differently.I’m sure I would handle it differently today with more of a Quaker way. It’s the nice person thing to do. Besides, I’m middle-aged now and bones take longer to heal as you get older.Cha-cha-cha.

Chuck Boutwell is a humor columnist for Big Fun on the Bayou. Opinions expressed in this column represent the views of the columnist, not necessarily this publication. He can be reached at chuckboutwell@yahoo.com.